When American armed forces working for warbotObama kill non-combatants in the Afghan theater, they are referred to in the press as NATO forces. MSNBC.com leads with the story that “A NATO airstrike in southern Afghanistan killed at least 33 civilians, the Afghan cabinet said Monday, an incident that is inflaming already heightened sensitivities over noncombatant casualties in the war.”
On the 15th, at least 10 people, including 5 children, were killed in Marja, with American rockets.
Face it, the forces might be deluding themselves that they are killing bad Taliban in Afghanistan, but they don’t really know who they are targeting. “NATO forces confirmed in a statement that its planes fired Sunday on what it believed was a group of insurgents in southern Uruzgan province on their way to attack a joint NATO-Afghan patrol.”
It turned out they were women and children.
On the other hand, the Israelis—in a spectacularly surgical operation—remove the blight of a terrorist from the face of the earth and the world, Israelis included, is fulminating.
That’s Sarah Palin. The Age of the Idiot means that, as I write, no transcript is available of Sarah Palin’s address to the Tea Party Convention. I would have preferred to speed read through the thing, but I am forced to view this. Thanks BAB readers for your solid comments on the speech in the previous post.
• Plenty babble about democracy being beautiful. The founders founded a republic, not a democracy, because they feared majorities as much as they detested monarchy.
• National security. More nonsense. The response to the pantie bomber is far more dangerous than the Mirandized man could ever be. Terrorizing the American sheeple at airports began under Sarah’s man, Bush. She repeats the asinine idea that the American military bestriding the globe, a presence that cost us a $1 trillion a year, is protecting our constitutional rights. Poppycock.
• Terrorists are trying to destroy the American Constitution, says she. Nonsense. American governments have beat them to it. To all intents and purposes, the Constitution is dead. If the lady doesn’t get it, then…
• Support for democracy and its dissemination across the world, now that’s an idea I’ve heard before. Bush branded the United States as the world’s “partner for a better life.” He also recommitted “our nation” “abroad” “to an historic, long-term goal”: seeking “the end of tyranny in our world.” If the Tea Party doesn’t reject root-and-branch this odious neoconservative formula; I’m out of there.
• “We need a strong national defense.” Middle America, or is it Meathead America, erupted in cheers when Sarah got militant. Uttered by Sarah this is code for gallivanting around the world, which Ronald Reagan, whom she invoked, did not do. He withdrew from Lebanon, remember? I’m for strong defense—of America’s borders, of her neighborhoods via local militias and well-armed citizens.
• I’m against sanctions, which Palin trumpets. We killed enough kids in Iraq through sanctions. “Trade, not democracy, is the best antidote to war. The more economically intertwined countries are, the less likely they are to go to war. Boycott Iran less and barter with it more and it’s bound to tone down its belligerence.”
• I liked the mention of Barry Goldwater, naturally. “We can be conquered by bombs, but we can also be conquered by neglect, by ignoring our Constitution.”
• TARP and bailouts. Didn’t her ticket support the Bush bailout? Isn’t she preparing to stump for McMussolini, the man who’s all for this Keynesian kookiness?
• Only twice did Palin get worked up in a real good way, and that was when she spoke of the effects of the bailouts and TARP on the states and the toll it would take on the Tenth Amendment. She should have remained a governor. She was good at that. The other instance was when she delved into energy issues—yet another of her strengths. If you read her book, you’ll know that, “when it comes to the ins-and-outs of the oil and gas industry—ownership, extraction, contracts and leases—Sarah Palin is as sharp as a tack.”
• The federales keep “making us take these steps toward insolvency.” Good. Palin did say that the federal government was printing dollars, funny-money, or worthless paper. More of that was in order.
Someone pick up from here. I’ve had enough.
Update I: GLORIOUS GIMPS. There, I’ve said it. In her advocacy, repeated in last night’s address, on behalf of “special” children, Palin is strengthening the contemptible tradition, embraced by “traditionalists,” of a politically correct tyranny, to say nothing of statism (when she ran as VP, Palin promised a department devoted to the developmentally challenged. Have I used all the right lingo?).
(Sarah Palin, the former Republican vice presidential hopeful, demanded on Monday that President Barack Obama fire his White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, over a reported expletive [“f—-ng retarded”] he is said to have uttered, CBS News reported.)
Palin is pathetic on this front. She also has it all wrong. If anything, a traditionalist ought to defend manners. I find the plain rude “f-cking” more offensive than the legitimate colloquial “retarded.”
Update II: Palin a product of affirmative action? I can’t begin to think why anyone would so assert. Not true. Palin comes from a poor, hard-working, wonderful family. She worked like a dog for everything she has, including catching and gutting fish, and eventually owning a fishing concern with an equally rugged mate, Todd. In her family, the college-goer paid for his or her education. What parent that you know (or who partakes on this blog) has done that bit of character- building for their brats?
Read her book before you declare Sarah a product of affirmative action. Her political career is also anything but. Campaigning for governor involved getting in the pick-up with Todd and the kids—and if Todd was on The Slope in a hard hat, then without the remarkable hunk—cranking up the music and traveling for hundreds of miles around Alaska to meet the folks.
The woman is fearless.
Anyone who doesn’t recognize Sarah for the remarkable lady she is a plain fool. I challenge him or her to read Sarah’s book, the worst sections of which entail her entanglement with the man Barry Goldwater despised, McMussolini; the best tell of her early familial and political years (and too little of the Love of her Life).
The press lied about the content of Going Rogue. Despite the shoddy treatment Palin received at the hands of a bunch of sleazy McCain handlers, she remained gracious and genteel. Moreover, the book is substantive. Liberals simply consider the kind of ideas Palin expresses and the way of life she likes an abomination.
Having said all that, problems remain with her stunted politics.
WHY on earth? Iran is no danger to the US. If it sends a missile our way, we’ll intercept it. But if the missile lands on a city (DC?), Iran will be communing with the 12th Imam in a matter of minutes. One push of the button is all it takes for the US to nuke Iran out of this hemisphere. Obama, who has been very active in bombing Afghani terrorists, their families and villagers with the aid of drones, will press the button.
Any American who says he’s afraid of Iran is lying, is chicken, or is really afraid for Israel.
I too am afraid for Israel. As I’ve said, Israel has been threatened by Iran. If the Jewish state perceives an impending danger of a nuclear attack from Iran, then the Israelis must do what it takes to defend themselves.
Since backward, poor Iran poses no danger to the US, what our somewhat disingenuous neoconservative contributors are in fact suggesting is that the US fight Israel’s battles. I cannot condone that—certainly not while pretending that Iran poses a danger to the US, when it does not.
Update IV: PALIN STATISM. Other than perpetual war and a department for the disabled, Sarah Palin is a staunch supported of some other big-government items.
Larry Auster notesthat “she is a passionate advocate of Title IX, the federal statute barring ‘discrimination’ against females in education which, in Atlas Shrugged manner, [I don’t get this obfuscating reference Auster has inserted] by requiring that there be an equal number of girls’ and boys’ sports teams in each school, has forced hundreds of schools around the country to discontinue boys’ sports teams. And she supports an expansion of federal aid to education–the very essence of the big government, socialist mindset!”
Update V (Feb. 8): BACK TO IRAN.
WALLACE: How hard do you think President Obama will be to defeat in 2012? PALIN: It depends on a few things. Say he played—and I got this from Buchanan, reading one of his columns the other day – say he played the war card. Say he decided to declare war on Iran or decided really [to] come out and do whatever he could to support Israel, which I would like him to do, but – that changes the dynamics in what we can assume is going to happen between now and three years. Because I think if the election were today I do not think Obama would be re-elected. But three years from now, things could change if—on the national security front … WALLACE: But you’re not suggesting that he would cynically play the war card? PALIN: I’m not suggesting that. I’m saying if he did, things would dramatically change. If he decided to toughen up and do all that he can to secure our nation and our allies, I think people would, perhaps, shift their thinking a little bit and decide, “Well, maybe he’s tougher than we think he’s—than he is today,” and there wouldn’t be as much passion to make sure that he doesn’t serve another four years.
Naturally I oppose a Palin foreign policy whereby we send our men to die for the safety of our satellite states.
One more pesky detail, for those of you itching for some war games (as you are not going to be fighting the war you promote): The US can’t afford the wars it’s in.
That said, you’d have to be an idiot to deny what Iran has been broadcasting: The Islamic Republic is cooking-up a Bomb. The French are afraid. So are the Germans.
So for America, war is out. All else is in. Get the IAEA’s ElBaradei working. He did a good job in Iraq before Bush kicked him out and flattened the place. Have the Europeans strain their nukes on Iran and create Cold-War deterrence. The peaceful options are endless.
So David S. Landes described Haiti in a 1986 article for The New Republic, entitled “Slaves and Slaughter.” The article harks back to a time when scholarship was more honest. Excerpts:
“Like the United States, Haiti won its freedom by driving out a European power in what Robert Palmer has called the age of democratic revolution. Haiti was known then as Saint-Domingue and was France’s richest colonial possession. Its wealth came from sugar and coffee, above all from sugar, cultivated on large and middling plantations by slave labor. These blacks made up more than 90 percent of the population. Saint-Domingue was in effect a piece of Africa transported to the New World. …
The blacks in the huts and fields, though touched by the white man’s faith, retained a mix of African beliefs and practices that we still know as voodoo, with a strong component of sorcery. Whites and yellows spoke French. Blacks spoke a Creole mix of French and various west African tongues. Two worlds cohabited, both of them brutalized and terrorized by a relationship of power and exploitation. The great mass of sullen, smoldering slaves had to be kept in line by whip and fire. Their white masters, quick to punish, had nightmares of slave revolt. …
Nothing is so ferocious as a race war. It is war to the death. Black bands surged through the land, killing every white they could, from the oldest of invalids to suckling babes. White garrisons sallied forth and returned atrocity for atrocity. Prisoners were routinely massacred, which only discouraged surrender. There was even an anticipation of the Nazi gas chambers. The French fitted out a ship as a mass extermination machine: blacks were driven down into the hold and asphyxiated by noxious fumes. The name of the vessel: The Stifler. It was one of the quieter ways to go. …
Jean-Jacques Dessalines, was filled with an immense, unappeasable bitterness. He drove out the rest of the French forces, and on January 1, 1804, proclaimed independence in terms that evoked the crimes of the past and promised more blood to come: “Citizens, look about you for your wives, husbands, brothers, sisters. Look for your children, your nursing babies. Where have they gone?” And then Dessalines personally led a massacre of every remaining French man, woman, and child in the country, excepting only a handful of doctors and clergy. …
Haiti has cherished the memory of Toussaint…
The effect of these barbarities is still being felt. The legacy of fire and blood was a population reduced almost by half and an economy in ruins. Fields and cities were laid waste; the sugar mills were a rusting mass of scrap iron and ashes. The houses were gone, the huts were empty. Nor were reconstruction and resumption possible, because the freed slaves wanted nothing to do with employment. No one wanted to work for another, because that was what slavery was all about. Instead, each wanted his own plot, to grow food for consumption and perhaps coffee for market. …
Sugar was finished. Even coffee exports dwindled, from 77 million pounds in 1789, at the peak of colonial prosperity, to 43 million in 1801, 32 million in 1832. As foreign earnings shrank, Haiti found it ever harder to make up domestic food shortages by imports. In the end, the government had to give up its hope of restoring cash crops and had to encourage subsistence farming. As the population increased, plots grew smaller, the earth poorer, people hungrier–a downward spiral of squalor and immiserization. …
It was a poor basis for a democratic polity. This was a country with an elective presidential regime, but it quickly acquired the characteristics of pillage politics. Poor as Haiti was, there was always some surplus to be appropriated. The property of the ruling elite was there for the taking by any coterie strong enough to seize the reins. So in 150 years, Haiti ran through some 30 heads of state, almost none of whom finished his term or got out at the end of it.
Many of them died to leave office, and their departures were followed by bloody, racist massacres–blacks revenging themselves on yellows, the yellows getting theirs back. In the long run, the blacks had the best of it, if only because there were more of them and they were the standard-bearers of unconditional negritude. …
THE ONLY period of relative tranquility was the 20 years of American presence. From 1915 to 1934, a regiment of United States Marines helped keep order, improved communications, and provided the stability needed to make the political system work and to facilitate trade with the outside. Even a benevolent occupation creates resistance, though, not only among the beneficiaries, but also among the more enlightened members of the dominant society. Progressive Americans, including Paul Douglas (then a professor, later a senator from Illinois), reminded their compatriots that it was the United States, in the person of Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt, that had bestowed on Haiti its new constitution, which proudly affirmed that “the Republic of Haiti is one and indivisible, free, sovereign and independent.” (FDR said “modestly: “… if I do say it, I think it is a pretty good constitution.”) Douglas went on to warn his countrymen against the “slippery slopes” of imperialism. The United States should teach the techniques of administration and then leave the Haitians to govern themselves. To be sure, Haiti might not be ready for that, but if we couldn’t do the job in 20 years, “there was little likelihood of our ever being able to do so.” …
No doubt. The United States left two years early, under the pressure of popular hostility and government opposition. The legislature then voted a new constitution (so much for Roosevelt’s efforts), which enhanced Presidential authority without improving the assurance of tenure. Coup followed coup, until the election of François Duvalier in 1957.
It would be rash to predict happiness for Haiti. Nothing in history justifies anything but faith and hope. But there are some six million people there and counting–abysmally poor 80 percent illiterate, yet full of expectation–some 700 miles from our coast. We had better find something more potent and productive than charity.
David S. Landes is Coolidge Professor of History and Professor of Economics at Harvard. His latest book is Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Harvard University Press).
I thanked Nancy Pelosi once in the past for going up against The Decider and his ditto heads. This time she’s owed some gratitude for confronting the Democrats’ deity.
Obama’s proposed Big spending Freeze is a big farce. In 2009, he increased overall spending by 22%. Nancy is insisting that “pork-laden Pentagon programs shouldn’t be protected from President Obama’s proposed three-year spending freeze.”
“While we all want to support our men and women in uniform… and our national defense and our veterans, I don’t think that we should protect military contractors, and I want to make that distinction very clear,” Pelosi said at her weekly press conference Thursday.
The government can’t minimize wasteful spending without auditing the Pentagon, Pelosi said, citing a 2009 report indicating that top U.S. weapons programs went over budget by some $296 billion.
“I don’t support exempting them from the freeze,” she said.
“… the Warfare State is every bit as corrupt, corrupting, and bankrupting as the Welfare State. Over $1 trillion is spent yearly on imperial expeditions that are awash in American blood, but offer few benefits to the sacrificed. Besides, what kind of a nation neglects its own borders while defending to the death borders not its own? [From“Addicted To That Rush”]
